The vast majority of reliability analyses assume that components and system are in either of two states: functioning or failed. The present paper develops basic theory for the study of systems of components in which any of a finite number of states may occur, representing at one extreme perfect functioning and at the other extreme complete failure. We lay down axioms extending the standard notion of a coherent system to the new notion of a multistate coherent system. For such systems we obtain deterministic and probabilistic properties for system performance which are analogous to well-known results for coherent system reliability.
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El-Neweihi et al. (1978) studied this question.
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